DISCLAIMER: If you guys want to debate this professionally, then I would be glad to do so, but if this is dismissed as me simply “quitting,” then it proves my point. If this is deleted it also proves my point. Players are tired of waiting and not knowing what is going on, and things need to change now._____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lack of Content & Poor Balancing

Nerfing all income sources while simultaneously making gems harder to get & not adding in new income sources

Lack of Endgame Content

Quests not giving good rewards

Perceived failure to meet promises

Failure to update consistently

The opinion cannot fix this, this deals with the Dev team and this takes time.

Miscommunication

Lack of Transparency between Elders/Staff Team and the Players

Perceived inactive Staff Team

Perceived inconsistent purg sentences

Opinion: Purg is used to often

Lack of Updated Rules & clearly defined Rules

Perceived Staff Bias

The Staff team and community can fix this because the theory addresses these issues.

These issues are generally agreed upon by all of the signers of the original petition. These are not in a particular order and are from my own thinking

As stated above I, and the signers of the original petition, see a correlation between poor moderation of Atlas social affairs combined with barriers that are affecting the dev team. Combined with this, the Elders’s limitation of staff information has resulted in many false misconceptions thus increasing general toxicity.Whose fault is this? Well we can blame the leadership of Atlas, as known as the Elders, because they have failed to address these issues in time. But that is simply not productive nor really right. Instead of blaming them, I have planned to write a solution. If this solution is accepted or rejected, so be it; but after I propose this document, I do plan on taking a break from Atlas. The reason I am doing so is simply because I care about the server and do not want it to fail. However, the misinformed decisions the Elders continue to make result in recurring issues and do not solve the problems addressed. Combined with both a really late response to my role-play proposal and the perceived dismissal of these issues, I have decided to officially take a break from Atlas. Until I see these issues properly addressed in this document, I will not be returning to the server. If people follow my example of resignation, then this just further proves my argument._____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Contents:

Chapter 1: Addressing why the policies currently in effect have caused these issues

“If you can't beat them, join them.”You are probably surprised at how simple these situations can be looked at. Math speaks to everyone. So here are some simple yet obvious equations

L = Limiting something T = “General Toxicity” - bullshit

L Playerbase to reasonable Information = Increased TL Content = Boredom = Out of boredom people get mad due to wanting to enjoy the server = Increased TL how the playerbase can communicate to the Staff team = Increased Staff Altercations = Increased TL both content and player communication = Less Efficient OrganizationLess Efficient Organization = Implementation of Bad SystemsImplementation of Bad Systems = Do not solve problems

Now I could provide a chart with times and stuff to prove this, but by using basic, rational thinking, the math speaks for itself. Now the counter document argued that people try to break systems and people are inherently mean, and provided “sources.” I agree with both of these, people are assholes and corrupt, that is how the world functions. The world solves these problems by addressing the issues. Technology is solving problems not stuffing the problems under a carpet and hoping they go away. The current problems facing Atlas, as cited above, are reflective of how the Elders are handling these situations. This formula displays this:

L both game content and player communication =Less Efficient Game

(Efficiency would be how fun the game is)

People try to break systems… that’s really obvious. What is ironic is that the document calls for sliding these things under the carpet instead of confronting the problems directly. The world works by confronting problems not running from them, which the Elders have continued to do.

If your system does not solve the problems facing Atlas, then it’s time for a new system.My proposed solution to the miscommunication issue uses the functional theory of communication. The intent is to have the Staff team use this system to influence future staff and development policy, this gives the structure the Elders have been clearly lacking and will allow them to set guidelines for how to deal with future community issues:

This system puts in place the infrastructure the Staff team has been lacking when handling these situations. It may seem very vague but when you use this system is it proven to be more effective than other methods in organizational communication(here).This is a basic system that you learn in any introductory organizational communications class at most colleges or universities. When you combine this system with these equations, the obvious answer is to make a system that actually solves the community/social affairs issues because the current one is failing miserably.

* This theory is based off this in the study of Organization communication

The math equations stated above show that the miscommunication issues stem from an ineffective staff team. This can be due to multiple reasons, people not doing their job, inactivity, laziness etc.

My solution to use also uses the system stated above and simply is this:

Hold Sentinels accountable

The “they are voluntary so we can’t force them to do their job” mindset is poor business practice and poor organizational management and is showing so with the current data we have to analyze. Holding the leaders of the staff team to some degree of accountability will result in people doing their job. Now I don’t know what the Elders want the staff team to be, but as it stands when you analyze the data, it looks like whatever they are doing isn’t working. The Sentinel position is the highest rank, and the people currently in said positions have not been doing their job, which is problematic. The moderation team should be managing and maintaining the Elder’s idea of the “community” while simultaneously updating the Elders on every major issue regarding said “community” so the Elders can make better informed decisions.

Conclusion:

If the Elders do not want the “community” to be every player who plays atlas then it needs to be stated in the guidelines.Limiting what players can do and ignoring the issues your system has is inherently poor game design. Not saying you guys aren’t working hard on the development side, but with the poor management on the staff side and the delay of content is increasing the amount of toxicity. Define the rules better, and do not limit the variables stated in the equations above too much and Atlas will succeed.

Edit: Since Game design is directly tied with customer service (the players) it only makes sense to give the players more choices to counteract the perceived "stale" atmosphere. My third and final reccomendation is taking a pro-roleplay approach, updating the rules and guidelines to simulate a ruleset like this:

This approach gives more play-styles to the players but at the same time gives more accountability to the staff team which is currently needed. A Benevolent Authoritative communication style does not work for any gaming organization because Game Design is based off of dealing with customers directly.

P.S It’s 2AM and I’m tired, so if you want to discuss this, then let’s do it at a reasonable time.

I have to agree with most of this document. TBH, personally i think one of the main reason the war of lies, and the current war between blothera and the coalition has taken so long is due to no seiges, or during the war of lies, them being broke. i understand technical issues, and that the all staff are trying to find a way for everyone to have fun. But war without any definite way to have a winner other than to wear down an opponents morale, is quite frustrating. there is no real way to settle things in a war fasion. which is a way that i think some people came here for. myself it was one of the things that did. but a very minor thing. on the overall. i tend to try and avoid war. but i cant deny if i am ready for it. or even if there was a definite way to try to find a winner to a degree would make it more enjoyable since the current way is only guerrilla warfare and propaganda that has a high chance that u may get purged, due to someone saying, "OMG that offends me in some manner. he called me such and such. or gave such and such title to me. I am not that way., it is slander" With the current rules i feel that is how it would go in most cases, and then be purged. of course i could be wrong. but that is how it feels currently. just reminds me of the state of our current world of Political correct culture. and i dispise it. i play games to get away from that crap. not play in another world just to experience it else where.

On the lack of content & poor balancing I have to agree with every point, but I don’t think its just the income issues. The Elder’s changed it this way (to what I understand) because they wanted it harder to become really wealthy. The problem there is that there isn’t things to spend gems on… I’ve said it several times, you need a sink that players WANT to participate in, that “leaks” gems from the overall economy of Atlas. There is little endgame content KINDA, but it’s more that the content lacks “replayability.” When you have done a dungeon and experienced it 10 times, there is no reason beyond its rewards to run it again. There are development examples and answers to this problem that hundreds of games have used… The quests are interesting, but offering gems that don’t really have a use is an ineffective reward. Nor are the quests substantial enough in terms of replayability (which ultimately is where daily/weekly quests could come into play). When the server first launched we saw lots of updates, almost daily (really almost too many). I’m super happy with the recent ones we had, but going weeks with nothing is demoralizing when the playerbase knows and is expecting things to get fixed and get better… and it doesn’t.On the lack of meeting promises, sure there may not have been a promise given. When the server went into dev period it seemed like everyone was given an expectation of a big overhaul that would see more content added to the game. Instead it feels like we got less. Two additional dungeons that very few run due to the organizational and travel requirements, cartography (which is amazing), and cooking (also amazing); but a massive lack of skill recipes and little to nothing surrounding that. Now I love Atlas, I love the feeling behind the design philosophy, and I will always push the server because of that… because I believe we will get to a place someday where people will look to Atlas’s systems for an example of how to do it. Right now it does seem like there was hyped up expectations that fell flat.

On miscommunication I think there is just a lack of community management in general. There needs to be someone doing the administrative stuff and there doesn’t seem to be. Someone whose voluntary position (or several someones) who are the communication line between players and Staff/Devs. For an example I would reference the person I think does it best out of anyone in the gaming Industry, Bex, from GGG. The Devs need a Bex. I think someone in that position would mitigate all of the miscommunication problems. I also want to say that I think purg is used as a hammer to all issues where rules are broken and that alternative means should be looked into; like muting someone if they are going off in chat from global/trade for a day, then week, then purg. Punishments should fit a crime and more than that, I think the bigger key is communicating with how a player can play in a way that doesn’t cause the problem they caused. Then finally, I think temp bans should be more utilized for repeat rule breakers. That should be more of a spectrum than just 2-10k purg imo.

I'm missing the math point here?

Are you trying to input words that hold different meanings to people and suggest some quantitative equation to it? Because it doesn't work like that...

A quantitative piece would be using actual data such as saying: Toxicity is player action that results in other players quitting.There were 5 players acting in toxic manners last month and 10 this month.There were 13 players who claimed to leave from toxicity last month to 32 this month.That is a 40 percentage point increase in the number of people leaving from last month to this month, so when the number of toxic players on the server doubles, the amount of people quitting due to it increases by 40 percentage points.^ this would be math... what you are discussing are ideas given your (and many others view points). Generally speaking variables in advanced math are always given the assumption that they are representative of numerical values, which is what allows certain properties and proofs to actually work.

I've read through the draft, the response, and through this thoroughly. When I was approached about signing it I made it very clear that I planned to stay out of it publicly, but I very much disagreed with most of the content on the ground that many of the points were aimed at allowing the very behaviors that have previously lead to people leaving Atlas, and making it a less welcoming place to play. If you play a nation whose goal is to ruin the game for your competition as a means to eliminate that competition, in my opinion, you should find another server... period. Because if you were treated in a way that ruined your fun on the server, you wouldn't be okay with that. Its not okay for someone to act toxic towards you, and its not okay for you to act toxic towards someone else. As a side note, I'm not sure why the Elders belabor on this point as if its a hard concept... its not. Its not merely "don't be a dick."

It is don't do something to someone else that they don't agree with. Would you force someone you are playing a board game IRL to drink a cup of tea? Like literally force it down their throat while laughing at them and then when they get angry at you for it, laughing at them more? Of course not. And yet when we look at toxic behavior aimed at "dominating" other nations or players, that is figuratively what they are doing. Its an enabling of force without consent. In real life these kinds of behavior result in crimes like rape and murder. In video games that mentality has less of a physical, mental, and emotional impact, but it doesn't somehow change the psychology of it to be non-existent (and no I'm not equating real world crimes to game toxicity, they are patently, OBVIOUSLY, different). The effect of implementing everything in the petition would create more toxicity on the server, which is the opposite direction that the Elders have been going in with the very changes you wish to reverse. And you don't offer a solution to how to deal with it... just remove it so people could act that way. The Elders are clear on the point of consent in their response as well, they don’t actually come out and say it, but they make it clear that trash talking that is “good natured” is okay. Well where would that exist? When both parties consent to it. And where they don’t, guess what, it hits their definition.

Anyway, I'm sure this point has been talked to death by all those involved at this point; however the fundamental understanding of toxicity should be playing in a way that forces someone to do something in game that they don't like, that eventually results in them leaving.

I believe the Elders are correct on the point that no matter how this was dealt with, it would be subjectively, and it should be. This is foremost THEIR server, they get to decide where it goes, how it gets there, what kind of player/audience they are designing for. So it follows their rules AND that application is theirs to adjudicate alone, regardless of what you, I, or others think or believe. If you can't get behind that, no one is stopping you from doing what they did, which is start and develop your own Minecraft server where you get to be the authority. However, you do not hold the power, even by petition (which is a great way to illicit feedback by the way) to force the elders to change to your will... and the audacity to think you should do this smacks of the very essence of motivation behind actions of toxicity. Don't like their authority? No one is keeping you here, you have the choice and capability to choose... which is more than you are giving them.

Now having said ALL that, a better system for the development is something I can agree with. And there is an alternative to just holding devs more accountable as well… take someone who has a passion for a part of the game, who wants to, for some insane reason like our Elders, spend a bunch of time developing new and exciting systems for our ungrateful playerbase. Enable them to do so… Skith is someone I would highlight for that due to listening to many of his ideas on mobs. He has a HUGE passion to make the game better, but its just… not used. Its left to figuratively rot. In my opinion the ideal should be to add new content and fix old content; allowing passionate players who can do the work and, while a bit insane if you ask me, want to, is just a common sense, smart, wise, choice.

On the note of breaking systems, I personally think that in some ways the design of atlas should try to include it. This is a server about discovery… if you can use magma blocks in dungeons (but no other blocks) that should be a thing players should not be told but learn and figure out.That there should be an optional wing or opportunity for players that do so to use. In a certain light, learning and using “exploits” should be a design feature, not a bug.

As for CH.2; that idea is generally called “procedures” and I expect the Elders already have them; but if they don’t then agreed.

For that last, honestly, if the staff current are not doing their staff positions then again the alternative to accountability is to just use those interested and passionate in the position. Hire someone else to do the job. Although some accountability would still be a good thing in my opinion. Some pressure can create an outcome where otherwise there wouldn’t be one.

Good morning, everyone! Hope everyone's having a great day so far. I figured I'd write up a quick reply to what I can while I have a bit of time, but I do apologize if there are glaring spelling or grammatical mistakes in this post: I'm 3000 miles from home, and the jetlag and changes in timezones are finally catching up to me ^^;

Now, to start, just know that, although the majority of this (Raxius') post deals with the petition and staff related issues, unfortunately I will not be discussing these points. At the behest of the other Elders, spurred on by my own (rather selfish) requests, I tried to stay out of the petition for as long as possible (though I did read over the documents sent my way just so I would have context). This does come with the advantage that, should a fresh eye for anything be needed, I am available for that, though some may argue I'm more biased towards the Elders PoV, because...Well, I'm an Elder.

Regardless, I figured I'd talk a bit about the development side of the Server a bit more, and address some of the misunderstandings and miscommunications of our content. As many of you may know, about every two to three months, the Elders plan for a "State of the Server" address which details out the current state of the Server (as the title suggests, obviously) and our future plans for it as well. Here we invite players to ask questions or give suggestions to our plans, so we can better integrate into our system what the community wants! (As a quick aside to this, we always love that you guys post to the suggestions forum! Even if we can't get to and read or reply to every single one, there have been quite a few great ideas submitted by players that we've already implemented, and others that have sparked quite a few ideas of our own! For a quick example, check out the general class of spells that you guys have now: dash, polymorph, and magic missile; that idea was originally submitted by one of you!) Now, as I said, we try to plan for these fairly frequently, and I actually believe our next one is coming up within the next month or so. Now, I understand this might not clear up all the frustrations with lack of content, but hopefully it can be a better understanding of where we're headed, and what some of our hold ups are.

Next, let's talk about end game content, namely sieges and war declarations: as many of our devs, and even our patrons too (who were given the opportunity to sit in on our weekly dev meetings during our development period), we are CONSTANTLY discussing sieges at these, mostly so we can make sure that they work properly and are fun for you guys! As mentioned earlier, our siege system in Beta was what we thought was a good system: people could opt out of it by simply paying 500 gems. What we didn't exactly expect is that the surrender fee would be the "default tactic" with dealing with a siege, and that comes down to a multitude of factors dealing with player psychology, time investment, material cost and potential loss...needless to say, I won't bore you with all the details here, but we knew the system was flawed in some ways and decided to look into changing it. Since then, we've come up with the Relic system, where you can literally opt out of the system by not having a relic, something we've discussed at the last state of the Server (and hopefully sometime later tonight I can find the link to the notes for this, and post them here). As people have already mentioned though, massive overhauls to this kind of system does take a substantial amount of time, along with quite a lot of debate to make sure it all goes right. As some of our devs can attest to, these debates can sometimes last 3+ hours weekly, and after doing it for two and a half years myself, it's not exactly the most exciting way to spend your Saturday night...but we try to do it all for you guys, at the very least, and that's what keeps us motivated to keep working. On the topic of debates, we also introduced the idea of War Declarations at our previous dev meeting, something we don't want to go public with JUST YET (oops, spoiler alert I guess) since that was another one of the nearly 2 hour debates we had in our meeting. So yes, while we are trying to get work done still, it does take time to both fully design and perfect the system, code everything entailed, and finally bug test it.

Furthermore, time to code isn't always something we have for a whole ton of reasons. As we counted the other day, we have basically 6 plugin developers: Mars and Macus (who help work on sieges, nations, and some of our bigger stuff), Ajax and Tyr (who work on a lot of the combat related stuff, such as smeltery and tannery, along with their own assorted projects like World Regen for Ajax and Shops for Tyr), Desert (who made Cooking, and is now working on a variety of projects), and myself (who made Cartography, made some of the Quest Rewards [which I'll touch on in a moment], and am now trying to work on Religions...though it's slow going). For all of the amount of work that needs to be done, the coding aspect falls on the shoulders of basically these 6, no matter how good a plugin is theoretically designed beforehand, it still takes time to code and bug test it, which isn't always easy. Now, even if you're not a coder on our team, there's a lot of big projects to do that are easier to chip away pieces at a time. For example, dungeons are pretty massive builds that require their own mythic mobs, event islands require some knowledge of world painter, quests require a good knowledge of creative writing and formatting into a proper script...the list goes on. My point is that time isn't always on our side for our bigger projects, especially since most of the developers we do have were at some point swamped with exam season in may/early June, or like me, are on a short vacation once their summer break started.

Anyways, let's talk about quests next. While I agree with Bis that gems aren't exactly the best reward to get from a quest...that's actually part of the reason I became a coder! If you guys have ever used the grappling hook or Karag's Sabre, that was my response to that exact sentiment: creating Unique Quest Rewards (UQR for short) that do small but special things that make a quest feel more worthwhile. I have a few more of these floating around, and some of you may have seen me show these off from time to time, but it requires a quest to be written to fully implement them (at least in a creative, dramatic, or impacting way). Also, if anyone has their own ideas for these, shoot me a pm. Kypen has already provided an amazing list of stuff, some of which I've been trying to figure out how to create. Still, it's hard to create quests that help move the story forward, when most players (or so we at least assume) haven't even finished the first part of the major story yet. (You can't skip to chapter 2 in a book if you didn't read or understand chapter 1, unfortunately...cursed Pedro Paramo.......)

Another thing to discuss is our flow of updates: after the server launched, there was a whole ton of bugs that players found that we never even accounted for, hence most of our early updates were bug fixes. Now, yes, there are a lot of bugs being reported to us, but also 1.14 is available and we want to update to that first. Unfortunately, however, 1.14 is very unoptimized from the looks of it, and Mojang was promising to fix their issues with 1.14.1, then 1.14.2...which alas, they fixed some but not enough worthy to update. We've talked about this internally with our dev team, and have decided it would be easier to just focus on bug fixing for the time being, and wait for maybe a 1.14.3 or 1.15 to come out, rather than hold our breath for any longer than it's worth.

Tl;Dr in all of this

Yes, we're still working on content, though a bunch of real life factors have recently gotten in our way, along with factors that we can't control (like 1.14). Next state of the Server should be soonish, and I apologize for what seems to be an overall lack of communication.

DISCLAIMER: If you guys want to debate this professionally, then I would be glad to do so, but if this is dismissed as me simply “quitting,” then it proves my point. If this is deleted it also proves my point. Players are tired of waiting and not knowing what is going on, and things need to change now._____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lack of Content & Poor Balancing

Nerfing all income sources while simultaneously making gems harder to get & not adding in new income sources

Lack of Endgame Content

Quests not giving good rewards

Perceived failure to meet promises

Failure to update consistently

The petition cannot fix this, this deals with the Dev team and this takes time.

Miscommunication

Lack of Transparency between Elders/Staff Team and the Players

Perceived inactive Staff Team

Perceived inconsistent purg sentences

Opinion: Purg is used to often

Lack of Updated Rules & clearly defined Rules

Perceived Staff Bias

The Staff team and petition signers can fix this because the petition address these issues.

These issues are generally agreed upon by all of the signers of the original petition. These are not in a particular order and are from my own thinking

As stated above I, and the signers of the original petition, see a correlation between poor moderation of Atlas social affairs combined with barriers that are affecting the dev team. Combined with this, the Elders’s limitation of staff information has resulted in many false misconceptions thus increasing general toxicity.Whose fault is this? Well we can blame the leadership of Atlas, as known as the Elders, because they have failed to address these issues in time. But that is simply not productive nor really right. Instead of blaming them, I have planned to write a solution. If this solution is accepted or rejected, so be it; but after I propose this document, I do plan on taking a break from Atlas. The reason I am doing so is simply because I care about the server and do not want it to fail. However, the misinformed decisions the Elders continue to make result in recurring issues and do not solve the problems addressed. Combined with both a really late response to my role-play proposal and the perceived dismissal of these issues, I have decided to officially take a break from Atlas. Until I see these issues properly addressed in this document, I will not be returning to the server. If people follow my example of resignation, then this just further proves my argument._____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Contents:

Chapter 1: Addressing why the policies currently in effect have caused these issues

“If you can't beat them, join them.”You are probably surprised at how simple these situations can be looked at. Math speaks to everyone. So here are some simple yet obvious equations

L = Limiting something T = “General Toxicity” - bullshit

L Playerbase to reasonable Information = Increased TL Content = Boredom = Out of boredom people get mad due to wanting to enjoy the server = Increased TL how the playerbase can communicate to the Staff team = Increased Staff Altercations = Increased TL both content and player communication = Less Efficient OrganizationLess Efficient Organization = Implementation of Bad SystemsImplementation of Bad Systems = Do not solve problems

Now I could provide a chart with times and stuff to prove this, but by using basic, rational thinking, the math speaks for itself. Now the counter document argued that people try to break systems and people are inherently mean, and provided “sources.” I agree with both of these, people are assholes and corrupt, that is how the world functions. The world solves these problems by addressing the issues. Technology is solving problems not stuffing the problems under a carpet and hoping they go away. The current problems facing Atlas, as cited above, are reflective of how the Elders are handling these situations. This formula displays this:

L both game content and player communication =Less Efficient Game

(Efficiency would be how fun the game is)

People try to break systems… that’s really obvious. What is ironic is that the document calls for sliding these things under the carpet instead of confronting the problems directly. The world works by confronting problems not running from them, which the Elders have continued to do.

If your system does not solve the problems facing Atlas, then it’s time for a new system.My proposed solution to the miscommunication issue uses the functional theory of communication. The intent is to have the Staff team use this system to influence future staff and development policy, this gives the structure the Elders have been clearly lacking and will allow them to set guidelines for how to deal with future community issues:

This system puts in place the infrastructure the Staff team has been lacking when handling these situations. It may seem very vague but when you use this system is it proven to be more effective than other methods in organizational communication(here).This is a basic system that you learn in any introductory organizational communications class at most colleges or universities. When you combine this system with these equations, the obvious answer is to make a system that actually solves the community/social affairs issues because the current one is failing miserably.

The math equations stated above show that the miscommunication issues stem from an ineffective staff team. This can be due to multiple reasons, people not doing their job, inactivity, laziness etc.

My solution to use also uses the system stated above and simply is this:

Hold Sentinels accountable

The “they are voluntary so we can’t force them to do their job” mindset is poor business practice and poor organizational management and is showing so with the current data we have to analyze. Holding the leaders of the staff team to some degree of accountability will result in people doing their job. Now I don’t know what the Elders want the staff team to be, but as it stands when you analyze the data, it looks like whatever they are doing isn’t working. The Sentinel position is the highest rank, and the people currently in said positions have not been doing their job, which is problematic. The moderation team should be managing and maintaining the Elder’s idea of the “community” while simultaneously updating the Elders on every major issue regarding said “community” so the Elders can make better informed decisions.

Conclusion:

If the Elders do not want the “community” to be every player who plays atlas then it needs to be stated in the guidelines.Limiting what players can do and ignoring the issues your system has is inherently poor game design. Not saying you guys aren’t working hard on the development side, but with the poor management on the staff side and the delay of content is increasing the amount of toxicity. Define the rules better, and do not limit the variables stated in the equations above too much and Atlas will succeed.

P.S It’s 2AM and I’m tired, so if you want to discuss this, then let’s do it at a reasonable time.

(06-07-2019, 11:43 AM)Wizardteepot Wrote: Good morning, everyone! Hope everyone's having a great day so far. I figured I'd write up a quick reply to what I can while I have a bit of time, but I do apologize if there are glaring spelling or grammatical mistakes in this post: I'm 3000 miles from home, and the jetlag and changes in timezones are finally catching up to me ^^;

Now, to start, just know that, although the majority of this (Raxius') post deals with the petition and staff related issues, unfortunately I will not be discussing these points. At the behest of the other Elders, spurred on by my own (rather selfish) requests, I tried to stay out of the petition for as long as possible (though I did read over the documents sent my way just so I would have context). This does come with the advantage that, should a fresh eye for anything be needed, I am available for that, though some may argue I'm more biased towards the Elders PoV, because...Well, I'm an Elder.

Regardless, I figured I'd talk a bit about the development side of the Server a bit more, and address some of the misunderstandings and miscommunications of our content. As many of you may know, about every two to three months, the Elders plan for a "State of the Server" address which details out the current state of the Server (as the title suggests, obviously) and our future plans for it as well. Here we invite players to ask questions or give suggestions to our plans, so we can better integrate into our system what the community wants! (As a quick aside to this, we always love that you guys post to the suggestions forum! Even if we can't get to and read or reply to every single one, there have been quite a few great ideas submitted by players that we've already implemented, and others that have sparked quite a few ideas of our own! For a quick example, check out the general class of spells that you guys have now: dash, polymorph, and magic missile; that idea was originally submitted by one of you!) Now, as I said, we try to plan for these fairly frequently, and I actually believe our next one is coming up within the next month or so. Now, I understand this might not clear up all the frustrations with lack of content, but hopefully it can be a better understanding of where we're headed, and what some of our hold ups are.

Next, let's talk about end game content, namely sieges and war declarations: as many of our devs, and even our patrons too (who were given the opportunity to sit in on our weekly dev meetings during our development period), we are CONSTANTLY discussing sieges at these, mostly so we can make sure that they work properly and are fun for you guys! As mentioned earlier, our siege system in Beta was what we thought was a good system: people could opt out of it by simply paying 500 gems. What we didn't exactly expect is that the surrender fee would be the "default tactic" with dealing with a siege, and that comes down to a multitude of factors dealing with player psychology, time investment, material cost and potential loss...needless to say, I won't bore you with all the details here, but we knew the system was flawed in some ways and decided to look into changing it. Since then, we've come up with the Relic system, where you can literally opt out of the system by not having a relic, something we've discussed at the last state of the Server (and hopefully sometime later tonight I can find the link to the notes for this, and post them here). As people have already mentioned though, massive overhauls to this kind of system does take a substantial amount of time, along with quite a lot of debate to make sure it all goes right. As some of our devs can attest to, these debates can sometimes last 3+ hours weekly, and after doing it for two and a half years myself, it's not exactly the most exciting way to spend your Saturday night...but we try to do it all for you guys, at the very least, and that's what keeps us motivated to keep working. On the topic of debates, we also introduced the idea of War Declarations at our previous dev meeting, something we don't want to go public with JUST YET (oops, spoiler alert I guess) since that was another one of the nearly 2 hour debates we had in our meeting. So yes, while we are trying to get work done still, it does take time to both fully design and perfect the system, code everything entailed, and finally bug test it.

Furthermore, time to code isn't always something we have for a whole ton of reasons. As we counted the other day, we have basically 6 plugin developers: Mars and Macus (who help work on sieges, nations, and some of our bigger stuff), Ajax and Tyr (who work on a lot of the combat related stuff, such as smeltery and tannery, along with their own assorted projects like World Regen for Ajax and Shops for Tyr), Desert (who made Cooking, and is now working on a variety of projects), and myself (who made Cartography, made some of the Quest Rewards [which I'll touch on in a moment], and am now trying to work on Religions...though it's slow going). For all of the amount of work that needs to be done, the coding aspect falls on the shoulders of basically these 6, no matter how good a plugin is theoretically designed beforehand, it still takes time to code and bug test it, which isn't always easy. Now, even if you're not a coder on our team, there's a lot of big projects to do that are easier to chip away pieces at a time. For example, dungeons are pretty massive builds that require their own mythic mobs, event islands require some knowledge of world painter, quests require a good knowledge of creative writing and formatting into a proper script...the list goes on. My point is that time isn't always on our side for our bigger projects, especially since most of the developers we do have were at some point swamped with exam season in may/early June, or like me, are on a short vacation once their summer break started.

Anyways, let's talk about quests next. While I agree with Bis that gems aren't exactly the best reward to get from a quest...that's actually part of the reason I became a coder! If you guys have ever used the grappling hook or Karag's Sabre, that was my response to that exact sentiment: creating Unique Quest Rewards (UQR for short) that do small but special things that make a quest feel more worthwhile. I have a few more of these floating around, and some of you may have seen me show these off from time to time, but it requires a quest to be written to fully implement them (at least in a creative, dramatic, or impacting way). Also, if anyone has their own ideas for these, shoot me a pm. Kypen has already provided an amazing list of stuff, some of which I've been trying to figure out how to create. Still, it's hard to create quests that help move the story forward, when most players (or so we at least assume) haven't even finished the first part of the major story yet. (You can't skip to chapter 2 in a book if you didn't read or understand chapter 1, unfortunately...cursed Pedro Paramo.......)

Another thing to discuss is our flow of updates: after the server launched, there was a whole ton of bugs that players found that we never even accounted for, hence most of our early updates were bug fixes. Now, yes, there are a lot of bugs being reported to us, but also 1.14 is available and we want to update to that first. Unfortunately, however, 1.14 is very unoptimized from the looks of it, and Mojang was promising to fix their issues with 1.14.1, then 1.14.2...which alas, they fixed some but not enough worthy to update. We've talked about this internally with our dev team, and have decided it would be easier to just focus on bug fixing for the time being, and wait for maybe a 1.14.3 or 1.15 to come out, rather than hold our breath for any longer than it's worth.

Tl;Dr in all of this

Yes, we're still working on content, though a bunch of real life factors have recently gotten in our way, along with factors that we can't control (like 1.14). Next state of the Server should be soonish, and I apologize for what seems to be an overall lack of communication.

About Us

Atlas is an immersive MC experience like no other. A custom nation creation system, mixed with the rich backstory and quest progression of an MMORPG, make for a world that MC players of any style can enjoy!